Once seen as a Western frontrunner of social progressivism and equality, Sweden has undergone momentous changes since the aggressive neoliberal dismantling of the postwar universal welfare state model started in the 1980s; today it is a stronghold of the European far right and has one of the highest levels of wealth inequality in the world. This essay analyzes the contemporary post–social democratic political landscape in Sweden, arguing that it is characterized by a state of both dissociation and melancholia, interlinked affective responses to the intensifying social pressures and structural crises the country faces. While the Right mobilizes racial melancholia to conjure up the stability of the past, significant segments of the political spectrum—including the Left—have long been demobilized by the stranglehold of a form of tragic optimism produced by a post‐1991 fusion between the twentieth‐century social democratic construction of Swedish exceptionalism and a neoliberal Fukuyaman triumphalism that disavows history and historical change. The essay traces this crisis of historical consciousness back to the hegemony of the Swedish Social Democratic Party in the twentieth century and the genre of folkhemmet nationalism that underpinned its project and whose affective afterlives continue to inform the political impasses we see today.
Neferti Tadiar (2009: 337) writes in Things Fall Away of an international post-1989 “tragic feeling,” an affective configuration that has emerged in the aftermath of the failures of revolutionary movements across the global South in the twentieth century. This feeling is characterized by
a sense that the signs of failure and closure were in some ways there from the start. This sense of the untoward fate already scripted from the beginning as the necessary or logical outcome of an intrinsic fault—this sense of, in a word, tragedy—moves through and connects recent critical, sympathetic scholarly accounts of the failure of contemporary Marxist liberation movements from Nicaragua to the Philippines. (335)
While Tadiar turns to Filipino literature to excavate sedimented energies of past revolutionary movements, I draw on Tadiar's analysis of national affect to probe the collective attachments and impasses that inform the contemporary political and cultural landscape of post–social democratic Sweden. If, as Tadiar and others suggest, political disaffection with the promises of nationalist projects of the twentieth century is a global phenomenon currently fueling the rise of ethno-nationalist and authoritarian movements across the world-system, then the specific cultural imaginations, political pathologies, and mobilizations that it gives rise to in their varied geographies remain to be carefully analyzed and historicized.1
In this brief essay, I aim to offer an initial outline of such an analysis of contemporary political culture in Sweden, especially with an eye to the current mobilization of racial melancholia by the Right. Building on Sara Edenheim's contribution to this dossier, as well as Tobias Hübinette and Catrin Lundström's 2020 book Vit melankoli (White Melancholia), I argue that contemporary Sweden is characterized by a state of both melancholia and dissociation, twin responses to intensifying pressures of structural crisis and loss felt over the past decades. If collective structures of feeling can be thought of as modalities in which historical experiences are lived and negotiated, then I ask what informs and sustains those prevailing in contemporary Sweden, and how a different sense or consciousness of history might emerge beyond the political impasses they produce.2
Swedish Folkhemmet Nationalism
As several of the contributions in this dossier stress, Sweden—or more specifically the Swedish Social Democratic Party (SAP)—was highly successful in constructing and promoting itself as a model of economic and social equality on both the international and national stage in the twentieth century.3 Founded in 1889, the SAP was in power for most of the twentieth century, including the uninterrupted and politically formative period between 1932 and 1976. A party whose long-lasting political hegemony—which lacks a counterpart in Europe—made it nearly coextensive in popular consciousness with the Swedish modern nation itself, the SAP successfully portrayed Sweden under its leadership as staking out a unique “middle way” between socialism and capitalism in the midst of the Cold War. This nation-building and nation-branding project, conceived of in the political crucibles of the 1930s by social engineering pioneers and fully pursued during the record-breaking Fordist growth years, was captured in the concept of folkhemmet (the people's home). Of early 1900s right-nationalist coinage, the term was repurposed by the SAP to embody socialist values and mobilized as a metaphor for the nation via the expanded image of a nuclear household, where every member across class and social lines was collectively cared for.
The term welfare state nationalism has been used by many scholars for the specific genre of Swedish nationalism in which Sweden is cast as the Western frontrunner of social progress and equality, a reputation usually attributed to its welfare system, state feminism, and the fantasy of the Nordic countries as outsiders to European colonial projects (Mulinari et al. 2009).4
Although Sweden has undergone momentous material and social changes since the 1980s, including the dismantling of significant segments of the welfare sector, this Cold War nationalist self-construction continues to profoundly shape national identity and underpin responses from both the Right and the Left. While an early version of this nationalism incorporated ideas including exceptionalism, the “Swedish middle way,” and political neutrality, these ideas were, after 1968, merged with an official ideology of color-blind anti-racism, state feminism, and Third World solidarity (Hübinette and Lundström 2020).
While the discourse of color blindness and social progressivism obfuscated more violent elements of Sweden's past and ongoing colonial and racial history—including its status as one of Europe's few internal settler colonies—it was insidiously fused with an early twentieth-century eugenicist and nationalist construction of the Nordics as the whitest people in the Western world (Hübinette and Lundström 2020).5 This double construction of Sweden—as the whitest and the most progressive of Western nations—implicitly united a eugenicist national image with a vision of political radicalism, whose durability in popular consciousness attests to the immense success of the public relations campaign that the SAP was able to carry out during the global Cold War.
If welfare state nationalism historically was aligned with an ideological defense of the Swedish welfare state model, one might say that it today has transformed into a kind of hardened cultural chauvinism increasingly emptied of material reference. This nationalist chauvinism manifests itself, I argue, on the one hand, as a dissociation expressing itself as an inability or refusal to affectively register or politically acknowledge the tectonic transformations Swedish society has undergone since the 1980s, and on the other, as an intensified melancholic, anti-immigrant nationalism, whose only recourse in the face of loss is the demonization of a fictive external threat.6
Changing Images of Sweden
However, the peaceful image of Sweden has recently been dramatically challenged. Over the past year, Sweden has been spotlighted for its bid to join the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, a procedure initiated by the SAP in the wake of Russia's invasion of Ukraine, ending a century of military nonalignment. A rushed process riddled by betrayals, the negotiations revealed how far the SAP was willing to go to quickly enter into alliance with the foremost Western imperialist powers. This included conceding to demands made by the member nation Turkey to arrest and extradite Kurds in exile, arbitrarily targeted by Recep Tayyip Erdoğan's increasingly authoritarian, anti-Kurdish regime as “terrorists” (Medin 2023). International and national coverage has also focused on the rise of gang-related crime in Sweden, especially soaring rates of fatal shootings.7 Donald Trump and other international right-wing politicians have repeatedly weaponized these events, framing them as evidence of the spectacular failures of Sweden's liberal refugee policies in the past, a discourse increasingly echoed by Sweden's right-wing government.
Whereas the speedy rise of fascism in Sweden has occurred in parallel with a demographic shift from being one of Europe's most racially homogeneous countries to one of the most diverse—today a fifth of the population is of non-European heritage—these developments have overshadowed another, underrecognized yet profound transformation in class relations. Today Sweden has the highest number of dollar billionaires per capita in the world, at double the US number (BBC 2024), and it tops the list of wealth inequality among all the European countries (Gini Index 2022; UBS 2023). Yet this silent revolution has largely fallen under the radar, while events relating to the changing political landscape and racial demographic are more likely to trigger moments of heightened national debate or perceived crisis.
One watershed moment was 2010, when the Sweden Democrats (SD) were elected to the Swedish parliament for the first time. Currently one of the world's largest far-right populist parties with direct origins in Nazi political milieus, the SD won wide support after a successful campaign that rallied for reduced immigration and a return to the imagined Swedish folkhemmet. Responding to their electoral gains in a fiery, well-remembered speech, the SAP prime minister at the time, Mona Sahlin, declared that “the Sweden Democrats are an un-Swedish phenomenon and will so remain”—a line which, in its invocation of the historical construction of Swedishness as intrinsically anti-racist, was widely circulated and quoted (TT News Agency 2010). Only five years later, however, amid the greatest European refugee crisis since World War II, the SAP caved in to the SD's demands and rising anti-immigration sentiments by drastically reversing the asylum policies, imposing strict border controls overnight and bringing numbers down to the European minimum level.
Hübinette and Lundström (2020) read these two moments—2010 and 2015—as moments of crisis in national identity, which triggered short-lived but intense responses: outbursts of protest, and in 2015, a spell of mass mobilizations under the banner of “Refugees Welcome,” which lasted for a few short months before quickly dispersing in the face of the new normal. In their analysis, these explosive but fleeting expressions of anti-racist sentiment can be understood as hysterical responses to a sense of loss that both SD supporters and left-liberals share, and whose brevity revealed their reactive rather than ideologically committed nature (11). While the SD has long traded on the fear of losing the racially homogenous Sweden threatened by non-European migration, left-liberals felt that progressivist Sweden was under threat. Across the political spectrum, the response was a nostalgic recourse to folkhemmet rhetoric and imagery. Collapsing whiteness with progressivism in their discourse, the SD called for rebuilding national cohesion and collectivist belonging by defending “real Swedish values.” The SAP, on their side, saw an opportunity to rhetorically conjure up memories of their illustrious anti-racist heyday, drawing on their historical arsenal of recognizable tropes in calls for national unity and international solidarity—that is, before the situation became “untenable” (TT News Agency 2015).
In her contribution to this dossier, Sara Edenheim similarly reads the near-manic reactivation of retrofuturist folkhemmet aesthetics during the pandemic as melancholic responses to a welfare sector whose decrepit state was suddenly and spectacularly exposed. While such a national crisis—cutting to the heart of the fantasy of Swedish solidarity and care—could have been politically radicalizing, owing to the virtual lack of any anti-hegemonic political forces or discourse to make sense of it, this experience could not be politically acknowledged but was instead suppressed, subconsciously internalized as an unarticulated sense of loss. In the absence, the hysterical performance of care via the affective invocation of a phantasmatic “welfare state specter” came to stand in for any real material solidarity for the sick, elderly, or immuno-compromised.
If Swedish melancholia responds to the loss of the imagined attributes that welfare state nationalism ascribes to Sweden and Swedishness—from the promises of the caring state, social progressivism, to hegemonic whiteness—then these nostalgic signifiers are activated anew in each moment of real or perceived crisis. As regressive affective responses, melancholia and dissociation interact to recalibrate the moment of crisis, diffusing its impact by conjuring up the stability of an idealized racial or nationalist past, or by isolating it to a single event—suppressing the haunting insight of its being just a moment in an extended structural crisis. Being more of a vague set of projections and fantasies than a real historical period or political project that either the SD or the SAP has a corresponding political program for returning to, this nostalgia is unable to illuminate, and actively works to obfuscate, the historical sources of Sweden's structural crises—and is as an affective response itself symptomatic of such a historical obfuscation.
The Long Neoliberal March through the Institutions
This obfuscation or confusion, which could also be understood as a form of crisis of historical consciousness, can be traced back to the SAP's own historical role in the production of neoliberal hegemony beginning in the 1980s, which marks the beginning of many of the accumulated and co-articulated crises we see in Sweden today. After losing the general elections in 1976 after forty-four years of consecutive rule and returning to power in 1982 in time to inherit a global recession, the SAP was swept up by the new neoliberal hegemony in international economic policy making and embarked on a series of notorious reforms that, after the 1990s currency crisis, cracked open the welfare sector for for-profit private companies.
After four decades of mostly SAP-led rule, Sweden's wealth inequality is today one of the highest in the world, as is its level of racial segregation and stratification.8 Industries worth 112 percent of the country's gross domestic product are owned by the fifteen largest financial families, while the highly financialized welfare sector has the largest proportion of for-profit corporate actors in Europe (Skyrman et al. 2023: 574). Scholars have characterized this system as a form of ongoing accumulation by dispossession of public assets, uniformly supported by an uncontested neoliberal hegemonic bloc (569).
The oddity of the Swedish case consists in the fact that this ideological shift of hegemony took place in the absence of a political transition of power. This has caused the neoliberal revolution to occur somehow more stealthily than in other countries, while strong historical support for the SAP has contributed to a political culture almost devoid of anti-hegemonic leftist forces in the past decades. None of the insurgencies and social movements that have shaped a whole Western generation since 2008—from Occupy, electoral left populism, Black Lives Matter, to the George Floyd uprisings—took any strong hold in Sweden. In 2023, when the retirement age was raised from sixty-two to sixty-four in France, protests and riots that lasted for months broke out, whereas barely any objection was even voiced publicly in Sweden when very similar reforms were implemented the same year.9
Welfare State Contradictions: Nostalgia/Dissociation
While Edenheim argues that the folkhemmet nostalgia that arose during the pandemic evinced an attachment to the “past futures” of the welfare state project, I remain much more skeptical of this form of affective nationalism. The spectral sociality that momentarily emerged responded to but ultimately blocked any significant recognition of the real asociality of neoliberal contemporary life, including the structural lack of reliable infrastructures of care.
These blockages pertain to the present and the past. The idealization of the past shared by both the Left and the Right also sustains the historical erasure of the many colonial and racial contradictions that the welfare state project and its regimes of accumulation were built on from the beginning—not least of which is the country's status as a settler colony. With forestry and mining as its main industries, the capital accumulation that sustained Sweden's twentieth-century modernization crucially depended on aggressive forms of expropriation carried out largely on Indigenous lands in the northern regions of Sápmi, with highly destructive consequences for the lifeways and culture of the Sámi (Lundmark 1998). This colonization continues today with the ongoing expansion of mines in Sápmi.10
If, for Tadiar, the end of the Cold War marks the beginning of an international “tragic feeling” that develops across the global South, then 1989 in the global North signals the beginning of a decade captured by Francis Fukuyama's “end of history” thesis (Fukuyama 1992). While this fantasy was shattered in many parts of the world in 2001, and then again in 2008, the merging that took place between the SAP's belief in historical exceptionalism and a form of neoliberal Fukuyaman triumphalism has proven to be exceptionally durable.
If melancholia insists on its attachment to a lost object—fictive, real, or both—then dissociation works to keep us in a timeless, eternal end of history in which nothing is lost because nothing ever changes. The contemporary political scene in Sweden suffers from these crippling forms of tragic optimism, stuck in the belief that history will remain the same forever, or that the lost object is somehow possible to retrieve.
In both cases, the past has a firm grip on the present, indicative maybe of what Mattias Nilges (2019) has described as a general crisis of futurity. If this crisis is a consequence of our inability to envision substantial alternatives to the status quo, it is also a crisis of our ability to collectively and politically apprehend the historical past that led us to the present. If melancholia and dissociative exceptionalism—two subsets of Swedish affective nationalism—thrive on this crisis of historical consciousness, they are also the affective conditions that sustain it.
While both the left and right remain mired in this political impasse, it is perhaps the growing racialized working class that will ultimately point to a path out of this affective deadlock. With less access to the optimism informing contemporary politics due to lived experiences of racial and social precarity, with limited investment in Swedishness or its glorified pasts, and more intensely subject to the increasingly fascist and authoritarian dynamics of the historical present, they are less likely to subscribe to the cultural forms of affective nationalism and perhaps more able to expand our collectively imagined futures. Facing the lacerating truth that the past cannot be returned, or maybe never even existed, the Left needs to follow and expel the ghost once and for all.
Notes
For this framing introduction and reading of Tadiar, I am indebted to Chris Cañete Rodriguez Kelley.
Raymond Williams (1977) defines “structures of feeling” as the inchoate, emergent collective affects that are not yet articulable within the hegemonic political and cultural frameworks of the existing order, indicative of a tension between dominant accounts of the social order and lived experiences contradicting them.
This vision was buttressed by the rapid development of universal social welfare via an expanded state-run, decommodified public welfare sector—including health care, child and elder care, and free public education—and universal social insurance protection, and in the 1970s, a series of policies promoting gender equality and equal labor market participation (see Skyrman et al. 2023: 570; see also Alva Gotby's contribution in this issue). As one of few Western countries to maintain a policy of military nonalignment during the Cold War, Sweden also became a leading Western nation in the 1960s in the provision of development aid and assistance for Third World liberation movements and developing postcolonial nations. The so-called 1 percent target was adopted in parliament in 1975, which outlined the goal of providing 1 percent of the gross national income for development assistance (Berg, Lundberg, and Tydén 2021).
The idea that the Nordic countries never participated in colonial endeavors or settler colonization is simply a historical falsification. See, e.g., Höglund and Andersson Burnett 2019 or Mulinari et al. 2009.
For an account of the construction of the Swedes and the Nordics as the whitest “race” and the superior racial group by nineteenth- and twentieth-century racial science, also called “Nordicism,” see, e.g., Hagerman 2006 or Painter 2010.
Here I draw on Lauren Berlant (2011) to theorize Swedish welfare state nationalism as a genre. For Berlant, genres are aesthetic forms that provide “an affective expectation of the experience of watching something unfold, whether that thing is in life or in art” and that “mediate pressures of the present moment on the subject's sensorium” (6, 9). They give shape and ascribe meaning and chronology to experiences, while also mediating, regulating, and suppressing emergent social incoherences of the lived present. As adjustment or defense mechanisms, dissociation and melancholia emerge from and sustain an attachment to Swedish nationalism by affectively managing the crisis events and contradictions threatening it. This might allow us to understand their persistence and psychic yield as well as the powerful blockages they depend on.
Sweden today has the second highest death rate from gun crime in Europe. Many of the victims are non-white teenagers or young adults.
As the only country in the world that subsidizes for-profit primary and secondary education, Sweden has not only become the country with one of Europe's most market-driven school systems. It also has the world's largest performance gaps between ethnic majority and minority students (Dahlstedt and Fejes 2019). This pattern of racial disparity extends from education to the labor market, wealth, and housing. As real wages have deteriorated drastically, 80 percent of the children living under the poverty line are of non-Swedish, mainly non-European, origin, whereas the unemployment disparity between native- or foreign-born Swedes has been the largest among OECD (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development) countries since the beginning of the 2010s (Eriksson 2011).
However, the growing environmental movement inspired by Greta Thunberg, and the massive pro-Palestinian protests that have erupted since October 2023, might signal a significant shift.
Another contradiction was how Sweden's postwar economic miracle was secured by extensive war-time trade and military deals with Nazi Germany, including its role as Germany's main iron ore provider. Claiming neutrality, the SAP retroactively recast this collaborationism, which likely spared it from falling under German occupation, as another instance of the glorified Swedish “middle way.” As one of the only European countries emerging unscathed and having profited heavily from the war, Sweden under the SAP used this historical episode to fuel a national narrative of Swedish exceptionalism, which grounded a sense of being exempt from the historical crises befalling the rest of Europe, that has lived on until today.
